Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [195]
Monica Lewinsky was running late; lunch had been delayed by an hour. FBI agents were “rushing around trying to get everything in place.” Tripp finally took the elevator down to the piano bar inside the restaurant, where she smoked a cigarette, waiting for her date with destiny. When Monica appeared, Tripp greeted the effervescent woman by gushing, “Oh, my god. How are you?”
During the course of their four-hour lunch, Tripp coaxed Monica to talk about a host of hot topics involving Clinton, the Paula Jones affidavit, Vernon Jordan’s role in arranging for her to meet with lawyer Frank Carter, and other matters. Among other things, Monica told Tripp that if she signed an affidavit denying any knowledge of Monica’s affair with Clinton, “I would be indebted to you for life. I would write you a check for [expletive deleted in describing the amount].” After both women laughed, Monica turned serious: “Because even though [Clinton] despises me right now, I know [in] my inner mind I love him.”
As incriminating stories came spilling out of Monica’s lips—some of which were purposely untrue because she distrusted Tripp—the FBI agents monitoring the conversation were horrified to discover that the microphone inside Linda Tripp’s blouse had slipped into an inconvenient position; they couldn’t track what the subjects were saying. Nor could they be sure that the conversation was being recorded. FBI agents quickly contacted Jackie Bennett, informing him that they had “a problem.” Steve Irons announced, “We’re flying blind,” comparing the situation to that of a spacecraft passing behind the moon.
Several plainclothes FBI agents slid into a table beside their subjects, “eavesdropping” on the conversation in old-fashioned spy fashion. Tripp’s preview seemed to be right on the money. Assuming technology didn’t fail them, they reported back upstairs, they should be sitting pretty. An hour later, Irons called Bennett to announce that the microphone was working fine. OIC was “going to be very happy with the report,” he stated, suppressing his excitement. The information Tripp had provided the previous night “is being corroborated.”
It was nearly dinnertime when the two women hugged good-bye and Monica Lewinsky headed off to her apartment in the Watergate complex. (Unbeknownst to her, FBI agents were following her.) Linda Tripp, her heart pounding with adrenaline, returned to the FBI’s command center to be debriefed by Starr’s team. Irons, in the meantime, wasted no time in transporting the miniature tape recorder to an off-site FBI annex, where it was immediately processed. Irons called Bennett with a quick update. “We got it.” The agent reported that by morning, he would drop off a perfect dub of the recording on a cassette.
Bennett, for the first time in this protracted investigation that had consumed nearly four years, finally felt that OIC was a step ahead of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
CHAPTER
24
A CUBICLE IN THE PENTAGON
Linda Tripp made no apologies, even after having been portrayed around the world as a traitor and a villainess, about her decision to expose President Bill Clinton’s unseemly sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky. As Tripp would later say, having retreated from the spotlight to a quiet town in Virginia: “I felt that it was something that the country needed to know, and I felt that it had to do with not so much his [Clinton’s] adolescent behavior or his completely poor judgment in partaking in a sexual relationship with a kid close in age to his daughter; it was more the recklessness and the arrogance. And that was something I thought the country needed to be aware of.”
Linda Tripp—born Linda Rose Carotenuto—grew up in Morris County, New Jersey, spending summers